VMware vSphere: A general system error occurred: Connection refused When starting Virtual Machines.

I had an issue the other day with starting a VM. It would DRS successfully, however fail with “A general system error occurred: Connection refused”

Googling tells me that the culprit is the vmware-vpx-workflow service being stopped. I SSHed into my VCSA and sure enough found that the service was indeed stopped.

So I attempt starting the service, and that failed.

What the hell? Doing a tail on all the logs in the /var/log/vmware/workflow folder don’t come up with anything. However after re-reading the errors during start I realized…maybe its a disk space issue.

Sure enough, our log disk was full. I grew the log disk, and ran the autogrow command in VMware to resize the disks in the VCSA, restarted the services and VOLA!

After updating the disk size, we were all set and I was able to start VMs without issues.